A RAFT of major highways improvement schemes have been given the go-ahead, including work on a road Oxford Mail readers labelled Oxfordshire's worst.

Oxfordshire County Council's cabinet approved a plan to bring £10m worth of major resurfacing projects ahead by a year yesterday.

As part of that work, resurfacing will take place on Kennington Road during this financial year at a cost of £730,000. Oxford Mail readers said it was the poorest kept road in the county in March.

Oxford Mail:

Other improvements will include extensive £9.1m work on the Botley Road corridor – which will stretch from Oxford station to Cumnor – and a £40m plan to save costs on county streetlights.

As part of the £10m roads projects which will take place a year early, other work to take place soon will include five sites on the Oxford Ring Road.

That will be completed at a cost of nearly £272,000, while resurfacing in Yarnton is expected to cost £467,628.

Yvonne Constance, the council's cabinet member for environment, which includes roads, said: "The highways team has worked very hard to bring forward this proposal."

Oxford Mail:

Quizzed by Mrs Constance on why particular roads had been chosen for the work, Owen Jenkins, the council's director for infrastructure delivery, said: "It's about the season and the deliverability. For example, there are certain types of treatment we can't do in the winter...so there are other programmes we will have to do then."

He said the routes for work were 'driven by data and surveys and data that come from them; insurance claims; customer complaints and inquiries.'

He added: "All these are blended together to find a corridor of work that fits the need of the asset."

Other roads that will be resurfaced as part of the county council's programme this year are include Wootton Road and Faringdon Road in Abingdon. That work, between Bath Street and Boxhill Walk, will cost £255,000.

In Oxford, Worcester Street between New Road and Beaumont Street will be resurfaced this financial year, at a cost of £190,000.

Other work in the city will include a safety scheme at Banbury Road with the junction of Park Road, which will cost just over £151,000.

More work will need to go into a scheme that might mean £120m is used by the county council through borrowing for investment.

A business case for whether that is viable – by using income brought in by Oxfordshire's increasing population – will be completed over coming months and presented to the cabinet for approval.

Other work will mean the county council spends £40m upgrading more than 50,000 streetlights – but will mean savings in the long run. It hopes less maintenance will save £1.8m and cheaper energy bills will save it £39m.

Mrs Constance said the work was a 'self-funded programme and that must be celebrated'.

But Labour's Glynis Phillips said the council 'seems to have missed an opportunity' by not having any electric vehicles, as the Oxford Mail reported at the weekend.

Mrs Constance said the council remains at the 'cutting edge' of promoting electric vehicles and that she had recently attended a conference on the technology.